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A Casual Rebirth: The Remaking Of Majesco

New Jersey-headquartered game publisher Majesco is, these days, best known for
publishing the Cooking Mama series.
However, the company, despite a long history in the game industry that includes the production of the Genesis 3 under license from Sega, has -- until
recently -- found a game franchise that delivers stronger success somewhat
elusive.

In the prior console generation, after some major expansion moves, the company
instead focused on high-profile core-focused titles. Its Advent Rising adventure game, envisioned as a sprawling, ambitious
series with a story by popular sci-fi writer
Orson Scott Card, flopped on the original Xbox; a PSP prequel was cancelled. In addition, results from the critically lauded Double Fine Productions title Psychonauts were not as promising as the
company initially hoped.

As a result, the company ran into some significant financial troubles in 2006, and Majesco's president, Jesse Sutton, announced that the firm would "focus primarily on publishing value and handheld video games".

Partly, this seems to have been a financial necessity due to the large budgets blown-out on its major title. But in the face of the success of some of its casual games -- particularly the Japanese-developed Cooking Mama series -- the company has changed
tack totally, and its financial results are improving significantly.

Now, Majesco is trying to concentrate on the casual audiences that made Mama so successful, control costs, and
pick the projects that look and feel right for a particular targeted market. A recent major hit is a Jillian Michaels fitness game for the Wii, and there's a new push on with a GoPlay line of family-friendly Wii titles. (There have been some sales mis-steps, too, such as apparently overlooked Wii rhythm title Major Minor's Majestic March, from the creators of Parappa The Rapper.)

In this interview, Gui Karyo, the company's
executive vice president of operations, spells out the company's new strategy in detail, and
talks about how having a focus like that has allowed the company to increase
sales drastically.

Majesco
has had two very large shifts in the past few years. One was to larger titles,
and then the other was a more casual space. You joined as part of
the more recent restructuring. Can you talk about the methodology of the shift
on a smaller scale? A lot of companies haven't been able to do it.

Gui Karyo: [laughs] That's interesting. You
know, Majesco has a certain advantage from its 25-year experience -- predating
me, obviously -- that they have always had the capacity and understanding about
how to develop a product for a low mean cost. And not just random product but
product that has a high quality level in comparison to how much we spent on it.

And certainly in terms of the shift from
triple-A games to the mass-market casual business that we've been focusing on,
I think one of the things that made us far more nimble at it than some of the
other publishers is simply that we understand the economies of development at
that scale. I mean, I certainly know that particularly for some of the larger
publishers, it's taking them a lot longer to figure out how to successfully
produce stuff where your budgets are often less than a million dollars and
where your marketing budgets are a fraction of that, even.

I would definitely say that there is a
certain thing in the Majesco DNA
in particular that made the process, of developing product in the price range
necessary in order to make the model work, feasible.

And then I say that the other element in
that is simply the real focus the company has put over the past three years on
identifying a product against a demographic and being very brutally honest both
to ourselves and to the developers about products that are right and not right
for that demographic.

You know, when the "casual" term
wasn't quite so ubiquitous as it is right now three years ago, people used to
come to us with "casual" first-person shooters. And, you know, what
is a casual first-person shooter? [laughs] I'll tell you what it is, it's a
crappy first-person shooter. What it is is one that's been made really cheap,
so it doesn't make any demographic happy. The people who like first-person
shooters aren't happy because it's not high-quality, and the people who want
casual games aren't happy because they don't want first-person shooters per se.

And now, obviously, the diversity of
product and creative ideas has shifted all sorts of things since that time. So
that second leg of the stool, so to speak, was absolutely the affinity and the
focus on what markets we're after, who are customer really was -- so it wasn't
just about price point; it was also about going the specific consumers, and
choosing products that work for them.

It
does seem like there's an art to make large success out of small games. Obviously, you have to manage
your cost of product against how you think you can sell it, but there's more to
it somehow. Companies like Atari have been trying this too, but there's something else in there.

GK: For me, it's focus. You know, what has
been really even difficult for us... Let's be honest, it has been a slow path.
It's been three years, but it has been a long three years in many ways. I think
that part of the reason that we've been successful is that we have remained
very focused on who it is we're trying to serve.

And I think that part of the challenge for
publishers like us [is that] we see hundreds of products a
year. A lot of them are phenomenal. And, you know, sometimes, I think the
difference between being successful and not is knowing that, "Yeah, this
is a great product." [It's knowing,] "Yeah, the creative vision is
right -- but not right for us because that's not what we do anymore."

What
we do is we target tweens, we target moms, we target various audiences, and
we're looking for products that fit certain niches, so that occasionally what
we do is we say "No." Products that another publisher might say "yes"
to, because they're very good product propositions, just not for us.

Case in point, if you look at Atari, I
think there's a company that's had its hand in a large number of different
things. And I think that they probably have been more successful than you think
if you start looking at where they've had focus. Like the Backyard Sports stuff has actually done really well in the same
marketplaces that we play in because there's just such a focus on that brand.

So, I think for us, at the end of the day,
what has been the thing that has made our portfolio work, where some of the
competitors who work in the same budgets, who work against similar demographics
had to struggle more, is that we've had for the past three years -- almost from
the day I started -- a very clear vision of who our customer was and how we're
going to fill needs for them.